Story time kiddies. Grab you pipe or dab rig, take a fat hit, and prepare to venture into the trailer park.
Willow Heights. That was the name of this trailer park. Sounds fancy right? Shit, when I heard the name Willow Heights I was thinking of some upper middle class neighborhood with pools at every house and stay at home moms jogging around every block in unflattering spandex. How wrong I was.
Willow Heights was not the worst trailer park, but it certainly wasn't the nicest. 50% of the trailers were newer, I'd say ten years old or less and in relatively good condition. The other half were dilapidated death traps falling in on themselves and the residents of said trailers usually didn't look much different than their crumbling mobile homes.
One such trailer was an ugly mustard yellow monstrosity directly off the road, at the front of the trailer park. The occupant was an old man. If I had to guess I would say he was 65, give or take a couple years. This was Mr. Allen. Mr. Allen was a large man, with a massive belly as wrong as a globe and about as hairy as a fucking gorilla. Absolutely disgusting. Nonetheless, Mr. Allen seemed totally oblivious to the fact that his physique was less than average, or maybe he just didn't give a fuck. Whatever the case, this man rarely wore a shirt. In fact, looking back on it I question whether he even owned a single goddamn shirt. He was balding, with that typically old dude hair. You know the one I'm talking about, when there is hair everywhere on his head except for the top, save for a few rogue white whisps. I call it the toilet lid cut, I'm not sure if there is an actual name for it. Anywho, he was covered in tattoos, many of which appeared to be names that had faded with the years into nearly illegible scribble. One that I particularly remember was a huge (poorly down if I may add) tigers face on his upper bicep. I'm not even going to speculate on what it's significance could have been, assuming it had any significance at all (can a tiger tattoo really have any meaning???).
So Allen had this habit. Sure, it wasn't smoking, and it was as bad a habit as drinking I suppose, but it was a nasty habit nonetheless. Actually, nasty isn't the appropriate word. I would call it more obnoxious than anything. You see, Mr. Allen had a water hose. Everyday, on multiple occasions throughout the day, for sometimes at lengths of an hour, he would stand right in front of his trailer and spray the water hose at full blast at a particular place in the gravel driveway. It was always approximately the same spot. He had a huge garden, but I never once saw him water it. Not once. It was always him with his head pointed downward, staring intently at the gravel, blasting the hell out of it with this fucking hose. This would go on usually for no less than twenty minutes, and sometimes as long an hour. To make matters worse, remember, Allen is directly by a major road. So, as he stands there in his usual cut off jean shorts, sweaty chest gleaming from the hot southern sun, spraying the ground as if to prove a point, dozens of innocent passerbys had to witness this on a daily basis.
To this day I can't for the life of me figure out why he did that. The only logical conclusion that I can come to in my mind is perhaps he had some kind of OCD. It had to be some kind of pointless compulsive obsession. Like I said, he was never watering his garden, or even his yard for that matter. It was always just him, standing in the same exact spot, spraying a singular area of gravel with the hose intently, as if it were some act of protest.
Now, I never had too much interaction with Mr. Allen, save for the several times I would go on benzo binges and would walk to get the mail and end up striking a conversation with him. Despite my lack of communication with the man, he seemed like a harmless dude. Well, for the most part. There were these two boys, presumably brothers. Two chubby little Mexican boys. One looked to be about junior high age and the other a bit younger, maybe fourth or fifth grade. I would often see them outside talking to Mr. Allen, usually on Saturdays when school was out. They would stand outside his trailer for hours while he sat in an old chair he had set up in front of this trailer (specifically for the act of sitting and spraying gravel, for whenever standing and spraying the gravel got too tiresome I guess) and talk his ear off. On many occasions I even saw him hug them goodbye. Long, drawn out hugs. Almost as if he was hugging an old friend. It was strange.
No worries, I assured myself, those boys must be his grandkids. Yea, he probably has a daughter that married a Mexican dude and that explains why they are so obviously Latino. Makes sense to me! Fast forward about a year into living at Willow Heights. I was outside one day with a trash bag picking up trash from around the trailer park. I would always become an eco friendly garbage man when I did coke, and this was of course one of those days. After about 45 minutes of my coke induced neighborhood cleanup, I had filled the trash bag to a point that satisfied me and I was taking it to the dumpster. I'm cutting in front of Mr. Allen's place when the door opens, and the two boys chipperly hop down the steps from his trailer, Mr. Allen right behind them. He gave them each their obligatory hug, and told them something along the lines of,
"Yea it's a really cool movie, you boys come back and watch it tonight with me. I'll make ya' some popcorn."
OK, I'm thinking. The mom must be just around the corner and is coming to pick them up. Cool. I continue on my dumpster pilgrimage and dispose of the trash. That's the point that I see the two boys ambling down the gravel trailer park street and ultimately into another trailer. I would later see them leaving this trailer for school in the mornings, and so I concluded that this was in fact where they lived. Still trying to play devils advocate, I tell myself eh, maybe their his daughter lives in the neighborhood too and those are definitely his grandkids. Not unheard of, right? Eventually I would see the boys' mother and father. Both clearly Mexican. Mr. Allen was as white as snow. This was when I accepted that these were not his grandkids, but instead some just some boys who lived in the trailer park. Now, I know, I know, I may be reading into it too much. Mr. Allen wasn't married, he lived alone, and never had any visitors that I saw. Perhaps he was just lonely. But I distinctly remember to this day the way he hugged those boys. Something about him just seemed...off. Somehow, and I can't explain it, it seemed to me that it was something more. More than just a lonely old man, something creepier, something more sinister under the surface. I guess I'll never know.
This has been Part 2 of Trailer Park Tales. Tell your friends. Thanks for reading.
Edited by yourboybob (09/28/16 09:26 AM)
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